106 BOOK REVIEWS

range from pupil development to performing a community service and from cognitive to affective development of students.

One can only commend the thoroughness with which the task is reviewed in curricular terms, with all this means for more ready acceptance by teacher-implementers. Even so, the reviewer’s experience with one attempt at major change in teacher role behaviours (Papua New Guinea’s Secondary Schools Community Extension Project) suggests that Scrimshaw may still fall short of adequately emphasizing the intensity of the professional effort necessary tore-orient teachers.

The book is well and clearly written without any dependence on jargon. It could serve well its intended pur- pose as a teachers’ and headmasters’ guide to the problems and especially the possibilities of CSS (as well as being helpful to curriculum planners and system administrators).

Presentation could have been improved by closer atten- tion to proof reading. Chapter sub-headings and paragraph numbering would save the reader the trouble of extracting the logical organization of the argument from the undif- ferentiated mass of paragraphs in each chapter. Since the tables and diagrams are so helpful in summarizing the analytic framework, it would have been convenient if their page numbers had been tabulated in the table of contents.

In all, a most helpful professional guide to those whether North or South, concerned with finding ways of making education more relevant to a world bedevilled by problems of social division and misunderstanding.

VIN MCNAMARA

Planning Education For Development, Vol. 4, Data Analysis for Educational Planning: Gary Lewis with con- tributions by Noel M&inn and Ernest0 Schiefelbein. Center for Studies in Education and Development, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Mass. 1980.

Data analysis is ‘really just a question-asking and answering process which starts with a clearly defined question of in- terest’, claims Gary Lewis, the principal author of this well- organised collection of papers on the subject, in which he opens with categorisation of the analysis techniques discussed in subsequent chapters on visual data displays, tables of counts, tables of central tendency and regression analysis. The explanations given are clear, usually at the first reading, and the examples used concern problems with which most educational planners will be familiar, thus creating a book which will be valuable both for self- instruction and for reference. It will also be invaluable on occasion to those who feel under threat of drowning in the flood of doubtfully relevant statistical ‘information’ placed before them by advocates of particular projects or policy options.

But the educational planner who has these techniques at his fingertips, and who has the political sensitivity to know what to use them for and when, will not, in most countries, be confined for very long to the educational planning office; he will soon have more important matters to attend to! Most of the techniques so lucidly described are usually not applicable within the ‘real time’ deadlines of educa- tional planners whose schedules of work are linked indissolubly to the annual budget cycle and the longer, but

no less crisis-torn, cycle of development planning. Data banks and microprocessors may alter the position in due course but unless and until they do so the refined techniques explained and advocated by Lewis are less likely to be used in the immediate task of policy-making than in retrospec- tive evaluation intended to test the efficacy of the policy variables employed. Even in evaluation the practical poten- tial of these methods will apparently be limited to cases where planners have both prescience of the policy-makers’ information needs and functional control over the relevance and accuracy of the statistics collected. There are perhaps two major exceptions to these stringent requirements. One is that much of the advice given on visual data displays is just as applicable to the presentation of plans and proposals for the future, especially where politically sensitive distributions are under review, as it is to giving an account of past events; the other concerns the use of ‘additive fit’ techniques to central tendency tabulations in making projections with the assumptions clearly stated.

In the final chapter of the book, M&inn and Schiefel- bein present the problems of data analysis from an entirely different viewpoint, that of the planner trying to make the best possible use of existing data bases to provide informa- tion of value to decision makers. Critical assumptions are made that: ‘Most policy decisions allow a wide margin of error, and therefore few decisions require highly precise in- formation’ and ‘Decision makers and managers need infor- mation now [authors’ italics]‘. They also emphasise that: ‘It is a specific project that is evaluated and corrected, a specific audience that is informed, a specific set of inputs that are adjusted’.

Selection of variables in this approach is made by asking decision makers, faced with ‘a lot of data [but] not much information’, what matters to them, rather than by the classical method of deduction from a theory, or model, of the working of the system under scrutiny. The authors illustrate from a case study in Paraguay how, by reducing the complexity of the statistics collected and by the use of relevant sampling methods, it is possible to analyse routine- ly collected statistics with sufficient speed and economy to restore a statistics office from a position in which others seem to have regarded it as a tedious irrelevance to the real business of government to one in which other departments are now beginning to see its contribution to the Ministry’s objectives and where ‘it is now possible to request and expect collaboration from departments that previously ignored communications’.

This description of what can be done, with relatively tn- skilled assistants, contains more grounds for optimism, in my view, about the future contribution to be made by educational planners than most of Lewis’ careful exposition of the idealised research practice which is virtually irrele- vant within the bounds of ‘real time’. It does however depend on the ability of the decision makers to recognise good questions in time to act upon answers to them whether they have been uncovered by happy chance (‘serendipity’) from existing data or by pre-planned evaluative research in- to past experience. The two approaches are complemen- tary, each enhanced by the use of the other, and it is perhaps the greatest value of this book that both are so effectively illustrated within one pair of covers.

SIMON PRATT